What types of activities do our students work on and how do they benefit from these activities? How does KUNO method support students as they progress from 3 to 6 years old?

Here are the highlights of our latest lesson.

Her

NURSERY 1 (born in 2016)

Language is about listening and speaking within a system of rules and conventions while literacy involves reading and writing in order to understand and convey meaning using print. To develop literacy in young children, emphasis is placed on honing the abilities of observation, listening, understanding, speech and drawing.

Children learn words by relating physical object to its corresponding sound (enunciation), which becomes more accurate over time.This lesson seeks to expand your child’s word bank with vocabulary from five different categories, namely: fruits, vegetables, stationery, animals and cutlery.

Clustering words within functional categories accelerates learning through an appreciation/understanding of word meanings. Through word clustering, children learn to identify the conceptual link tying different words together, thereby building a knowledge network supporting inferential reasoning and comprehension.

Your child will also be engaged in role play, taking on the perspectives of different story characters in a fictional scenario. Role-playing is a fun way to practice communication skills, build confidence and express creativity. This also provides an opportunity to put the newly acquired words into practice.

NURSERY 2 (born in 2015)

Instrumental to both academic and social performance, significant emphasis is placed on developing your child’s listening skills. Good listening skills are important for effective language acquisition –to register accurate enunciation of words and refine grammar / vocabulary usage. Improving listening skills at an early age also strengthens your child’s attention and concentration powers.

This lesson, children will take turns to read stories aloud and practice listening to one another.Introducing the 5W1H framework (Who, What, Where When, Why and How), we will be reviewing these stories to check for understanding and discuss about the moral lessons learnt.

Subsequently, your child will be engaged to act out a story. The concept of perspective taking is reinforced as he/she role-plays as different characters in the story.He/she will also be challenged to prepare their own props and memorise/improvise character lines as an opportunity for creative expression and motor skills practice.

Here, children are reminded of proper listening etiquette, such as giving respect and attention to those presenting.Additionally, your child will learn several presentation techniques, such as maintaining eye contact for audience engagement as well as using appropriate body language / pronunciation emphasize a point and/or draw attention.

KINDERGARTEN 1 (born in 2014)

Children appear better equipped to answer questions directly in comparison to justifying / explaining the “why” behind their answers (i.e. mathematical formulas are applied without full understanding). Similarly, young children are limited by their literal understanding and remain unaware of why some things happen as they do, even when directly involved.

Hence, we seek to transform these young children from literal to analytical thinkers, by introducing in this lesson the concept of causality. Cause-and-effect analysis helps unravel the question as to why an event occurs (effect), by forming a logical connection with another event (cause).

Identifying and understanding causality guides children as they work through problems of increasing complexity. From the social aspect, cause-and-effect analysis helps children understand why consequences in the form of reward and punishment are administered in response to actions taken. Since the cause-and-effect framework also forms a huge part of storytelling, a strong grasp of this concept can strengthen a child’s comprehension and writing skills.

Activities will train your child to make logical predictions of scenario outcomes (effects / consequences) based on events/actions that occur in the narratives and vice versa. Children will also practice verbal and written expression of cause-and-effect scenarios using the “if – then” sentence structure, and be guided to create stories using the 5W1H framework. Lastly, we will reinforce phonetics by reviewing letter sounds and consonant digraphs.

KINDERGARTEN 2 (born in 2013)

Due to its importance for interpersonal and academic success, language acquisition is a prominent goal in early childhood education. By the age of 6, most children would have familiarised themselves with the English phonics system and have thousands of words at their disposal. Yet, while picking up a language might appear easy, language mastery is not. Language mastery is highly dependent on the environment - requiring consistent and frequent exposure through listening, reading and verbalising.

As some of the first few narratives introduced to young children, fairy-tales and fables can be a familiar world to most. This week, we enter this magical world together, recounting several popular classics and introducing some less prominent ones. With some ground of familiarity, we will use this opportunity to practice perspective taking from different characters / roles and explore the main themes (moral lesson) within each narrative.

Through this process, your child will be trained to listen, connect and compare information, to identity story titles based on auditory descriptions as well as pick out differences between the story form - read by the teacher, in contrast to an illustrated picture form – presented to each child. Additionally, he/she will be challenged to make logical predictions of story outcomes based on the flow of the narratives. Ultimately, this lesson seeks to introduce your child to a stylistic technique of writing moral stories, to add depth, impact and diversity in narrative writing.